


The End of the Beginning

by XWingAce



Series: Ragnarok: The End of the Beginning [1]
Category: Ragnarok (TV 2020)
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, Identity Reveal, Norse Mythology - Freeform, Post-Series 1, Ragnarok S01E06 Episode Tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:54:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23098159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XWingAce/pseuds/XWingAce
Summary: Magne Seier has been holding back his entire life. But these new powers, he can't hold back forever. And Laurits may have been quietly observing in the background so far ... but now he wantsin.
Series: Ragnarok: The End of the Beginning [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1699480
Comments: 17
Kudos: 128





	1. Integration

Magne Seier has been holding back his entire life.

_Especially_ this past year. This year, he couldn't even trust his own estimation of his strength. And the sense of something ancient and powerful, lurking within him made him want to lock whatever it was in. But holding back was nothing new.

Not that he's always held back _successfully,_ mind. He'd lost his temper many times, in half-controlled attempts at standing up for his brother or himself. Every failure to control his temper resulted in his mother eating her way through a week's worth of junk food in an hour or two. It also earned him visits to therapists and counsellors.

"What if you redirect your anger somewhere else?" suggested one of them, giving him a Tangle to play with. "You're such a big guy, you should try to be gentle," said another counsellor, as if that wasn't why he was being bullied in the first place. "Words don't get you punished as hard," said Laurits – but that was easy for him to say. Words never came that smoothly to Magne. He still knew what was _right_ and what wasn't. But for his mother's – for his family's -- sake, he tried the peaceful way first, anyway.

Right now, he's quite convinced that he _shouldn't_ hold back. The ancient thing inside of him takes hold of his heart, pushing adrenaline into his veins. _This is the time to fight_. And yet he holds back. The power took him over when he fought off that monster dog; he ended up bloody and in deeper and deeper shit. At that moment he'd become a spectator to his own actions, which is the scariest thing of all. So he keeps the power at bay. If he doesn't, he has no idea who he'll be afterward.

Vidar Jutul shakes off every blow Magne delivers with his newfound strength. Hitting him is like striking a wall. Worse than striking a wall, in fact, because when Vidar loses his patience he throws Magne through several of them. It hurts less. The first one, at least.

Soon Vidar has him by the throat, spitting insults in the old language. There's bloodlust in his eyes.

_If you don't stop holding back now, you'll die_.

Enough. Magne gives in to the ancient thing that's been worrying at his subconscious and lets a force of nature flow through him. He throws up his hands and nature obliges, sending lightning down through him and into Vidar.

Darkness.

\--

It's the rain that wakes Magne up. It's pouring down on his face, ice-cold despite the warm day. Vidar is still down. He seems to be unconscious, but Magne doesn't want to check any closer. He's a little scared of what he might find.

Right now, the important thing is to not be _here._ Anywhere else will do, as long as it's somewhere provably _not here_. He's gotten in trouble enough, lately. Fjor and Gry are long gone. He could track them down, but that doesn’t help anyone, either. Human instinct is to run _up_ in times of trouble. Up, in Edda, means up the mountain. Magne runs as fast as his legs will take him. He's beside the glacier in _minutes_.

Someone built a small cairn here, to honour Isolde. It's as good a place as any to rest for a bit. Magne sits down next to the cairn. Isolde also left her marks here, with the markers tracking the glacier's retreat sketching a path up the mountain. It should be cold here. This close to the glacier, it should be almost freezing. But Magne isn't cold. That's weird. He should at least be feeling some discomfort from his soaked clothes. Or sweaty from the run. But there's only some leftover adrenaline from the earlier fight. Magne lets himself fall backwards until he's lying flat on the rocks, looking up. He closes his eyes. He tries to find the ancient entity that he's felt act through him ever since he came back to Edda.

It's gone. There is no longer anything lurking around in Magne's head that doesn't feel fully himself. He tries a few sentences in Old Norse. They come as easily as they've done before, but the sense of someone other than him speaking them is gone.

The power isn't gone, though. If his run up the mountain wasn't proof enough, Magne can feel the clouds gathering above, still laden with moisture. The heat today at least made sure there was a lot of water vapour in the air.

But rain up here would be wrong, too. The glacier would only melt faster. Perhaps, hopefully, he's managed to stop the worst of Jutul Industries' pollution of the glacier now. But there's still a lot of toxins in the earth and in the ice. If more of it melts, that will all be released too. If anything should fall here, it should be snow.

He's barely finished the thought when there is a feather touch on his face. Magne opens his eyes to a world of white crystals, slowly drifting down.

He smiles and thinks of Isolde. It's weather, not climate, but it's a start.


	2. Expansion

Magne sets his pace for the walk back home at a leisurely stroll. It gives him time to enjoy the powered-sugar look of the mountain as the snow falls. Most of it, down here beneath the snowline, will have melted by the time he's home, but while he's passing, it still looks pretty.

When he reaches home, his reception is nowhere near as peaceful as his walk.

"Where have you been all this time? You're supposed to be under my supervision, you can't just run off!" His mother's voice rises higher and higher, both in volume and pitch.

"I went for a walk," Magne says. It's true, after all. "Up the mountain."

"Is that why you're soaked through?" Turid is already deflating, her voice falling as she gives a tug at his jacket. It is, indeed, wet through and through. She shakes her head and takes his hands. "If they think you're relapsing, you could go to prison. I could lose my job. And then where would we be?"

Magne shrugs. "I needed to clear my head." Also true. And it's clearer now than it's been in a while.

His mother wipes her face. "What is going on with the two of you?" She sighs. "All right, up to your room. You're grounded until further notice. And take those clothes off, maybe they can still be salvaged."

"Yes, mama."

\--

Magne's stripping out of his jacket and shirt when Laurits enters his room. "Man, that woman can scream," he says, twisting a finger in one ear. "Was she trying to make sure the Jutuls heard her, or what?"

Magne dumps his shirt on top of the laundry basket. "She gets angry because she cares."

Laurits snorts. "About you, maybe." He drops down on Magne's bed. "Me, I'm just sort of around, to be tolerated at best." He stretches across the bed, throwing aside the nightclothes piled on the pillow.

"That's not true," Magne says, grabbing his pajama top. "I get in trouble more. " Especially recently. "You always manage to fit in even when you stand out, so she doesn't have to worry as much about you."

That gets him a laugh. "Well, not today, big guy. Today, we are both in trouble."

Magne pauses, his top halfway over his head. "What?" He gives a sharp tug so he can see his brother again. "What did you do?"

"If you hadn't run off, like an _ass,_ " Laurits uses the English word with, as far as Magne can tell, perfect pronunciation, " you'd know." He sits up, folding his legs, and grins at Magne. Magne shrugs, motioning with his hands to convey 'So?' without actually speaking. "I dressed up as our esteemed principal and highjacked her speech. I made her the laughingstock of the town. Well, of anyone not completely in their pocket, anyway." A quick glance toward the door of the room implies their mother hadn't found it funny.

"Oh? How did you manage that?" Clouds are gathering outside. It's going to rain again soon. Magne moves over to close the window before picking up the pajama bottoms that have landed underneath the windowsill.

"You'd be amazed, the things you can pick up on when nobody is paying attention to you." Laurits picks at the repair over Magne's bed where Magne had put his fist through the roof in a fit of frustration. "And you've been so disruptive that nobody _has_ been paying attention to me for months." He takes a deep breath. "I've also seen what the Jutuls are capable of, Magne. Maybe you're a little crazy, but you're not _wrong_. They don't care about anyone they can't profit off. And they were putting an awful lot of work into keeping you down. And Gry, too. That silly paper you two wrote doesn't deserve that much punishment."

"Not just the paper. You don't know the half of it." By now Magne has changed into his pajamas but Laurits is still hogging the bed, so he sinks onto his chair. He leans back, closing his eyes for a second. Today's been a long day. There's a few rumbles of thunder from outside. There might be another storm coming. Whatever Magne had done this afternoon, it'd had its effects. He considers asking the storm to stay away, but there's no point. Let the weather be the weather. Rain is better than drought.

Fabric rustles as Laurits shrugs. "Yeah, well, I had enough of them punching down. So I spoke up."

"Thank you."

"You can thank me by telling me where you were this afternoon."

"At the May 17th celebration."

"Ha. Ha. After that."

"Taking a walk up the mountain."

Laurits is silent for a while. Magne opens his eyes to see what his brother is up to. He finds Laurits frowning at him, eyes narrowed. Eventually, he breaks out into a shark-like grin. "Congratulations, big guy. You're finally learning guile. Took you long enough." He slinks off the bed toward the laundry basket and holds up Magne's shirt. "There's blood on here. You're lucky mom didn't see it."

He drops the shirt back on the basket. "You did steal my thunder this afternoon, you know? Gry was gone, Fjor was gone – even Vidar had run off. I gave that speech to Ran Jutul's face and nobody I actually wanted to see the reaction of was there."

"I'm sorry." What else is there to say? Magne didn't leave that celebration to spite his brother. He didn't even know Laurits would do anything.

Laurits waves his hand, dismissing the apology. "I don't want apologies. I want to know what _happened_. You've been weird since we got here, but then the Jutuls sent that dog after you and they just. kept. coming." A headshake. "You don't do that to a delusional highschooler. You do it to someone who is on to something. I want in."

"Are you sure? You're the one who's been calling me crazy right along with everyone else for the past months."

"Hit me."

Magne has to laugh at that one. But he's not going to _hit_ his brother literally. He can start with the parts that are believable, at least. "Vidar left the celebration because the police found some of his barrels of chemicals on their doorstep." For a second, he smiles at the thought of Vidar's face when he found out. But then the rest of the day catches up again and the smile fades.

"How did they get there?" Magne doesn't answer that. He looks up at his little brother standing over him. It's fun to see Laurits stumped for once. His lips twitch as he catches on. "You put them there?"

Magne nods. "I couldn't think of a better way to make sure the police found out."

"I'm sure _I_ could think of something," Laurits says, cocking his head and clearly trying to come up with ideas. "But that's already way sneakier than you usually get. I’m impressed." He leans against the Magne's desk. "So you snuck out to see how he responded?"

"I was following Fjor and Gry." Magne raises his hands in a big shrug. "Before they left, Saxa was prodding Fjor. I don't think he wanted to go off with Gry right then. I had a bad feeling about it. So I followed."

"Guile, subterfuge _and_ voyeurism. We'll make a proper teenager out of you yet."

Magne doesn't copy his brother's smile. The sky outside matches his seriousness, with the clouds now blocking out the setting sun. "This is where it stops being funny. I found Fjor _attacking_ Gry. I stopped him, but then Vidar caught up with us. He must have tracked us down." Magne shudders at the memory of Vidar calling out for Thor and reciting his battle oaths. That fight had been very one-sided. His hand twitches. He would very much like to be holding a hammer right now. There is nothing on his desk that even comes close. "He tried to kill me."

"Whoa. What?" Laurits jumps to his feet. "No need to raise the dramatic stakes that far."

Magne gets up too, so he can take the bloody shirt and show it to Laurits again. "This is _my_ blood. I hit Vidar as hard as I could – he didn't even feel it." His brother has seen Magne use his strength, at least to some extent. Laurit's eyes widen as Magne's words sink in. Thunder rumbles again close by, as if to match his mood from this afternoon. "He threw me around like I was nothing."

Laurits swallows. He's looking up at Magne, close because they have to be. The room isn't any bigger. "So how did you get out of that?" The words come out in a breathless whisper. Laurits hasn't finished speaking when lightning strikes with a deafening roar. A tree right outside Magne's window explodes into flames.

In the cold light of the lightning strike, Laurits changes. Instead of blond his hair is now bright red and his eyes, still wide, are yellow like Vidar's. Magne jumps back, hitting his head against the slanted ceiling. Then the flash is past, and Laurits is back to normal. He's shaking his head while Magne heads for the window to get a closer look at the fire.

Only a single pine is burning. The surrounding trees are all fine. And now there's rain coming down, containing even the sparks that are jumping from the burning tree.

Laurits joins him at the window. He's rubbing his temples. "What was that?" he asks in Old Norse and then stops. His next words are in his own language again. "What the hell did I just say?"

Magne looks down. On his desk is the reader on the Norse Gods Erik had given them on their first day at school. It is open, folded back to show only one page.

Loki.


End file.
